What the Fran

A dragon birthday game

For my wife's birthday last weekend I ran her and her friends a D&D one shot. My brief was thus:

There were six of them. I had no clue how to balance six level eleven characters. I did keep saying, there's a reason one-shots are generally lower-level characters. Plus four of these players I'd never played with before and two of the four haven't played all that much. Balancing not just in terms of encounters but time. So I winged it, basically. Which is what I think has to happen mostly anyway, in any game. Flexibility.

Their regular game is more on the lighthearted, carousing, romancing end of the spectrum. My wife and her friend wanted something a bit more serious. They were here to kill a dragon and get treasure. Not seduce each other.

So I proposed a dragon hoard in a volcano lair and got to work. I knew some other fun stuff my wife would enjoy. Traps, riddles, and Medusa. My own brief was, because people often play online, and even at the table I know these guys do a lot of theatre of the mind or basic maps in a book... to do scenery.

The scenery I knew would be a stretch. But it really was a stretch. Several times I almost ditched it all. It looked like it had been made by six-year-olds. No shade to six-year-olds, they are extremely creative. I bought foam bits that I couldn't get to work at all. I wanted a vertical level that wouldn't work either. I wanted walls, nope. Plus I was trying to construct all this mostly while my wife was also in the house. Whenever she went off to do anything in the evening I'd whip it all out. If she was just upstairs playing I'd tell her to announce herself before she came down to let me tidy up. I was covered in paint. It was a mess.

There was a lot of crepe paper (pronounced creepy paper, per What We Do in the Shadows) and that meant no grid which meant me cutting out little rulers. Which everyone really enjoyed, finding them more flexible than the grid. I also did some cones and different-sized circles for areas of effect and stuff.

For decorations I broke out the Halloween stuff. A lot of ivy, some cobwebs with skeletons in them. For the dragon cave vibe. One of the people hadn't been to our house before and I had to point out there was usually less fake ivy.

The twisty twist was the dragon was in the very first cave. A dragon adventure that starts with the big bad. It didn't throw my wife, she knows me, but it got the others for a minute. Then they get trapped in there with some looky-loo villagers, the volcano is going to erupt, the only way out is through.

Through a petrified forest with a medusa, running a lava gauntlet, climbing a cliff being splattered with lava and pelted with rocks by kobolds, then the final boss ancient gold dragon and riding a volcanic eruption out of there.

Player versus environment is my jam and this was a volcano so there was falling rocks, gassy mushrooms, bubbling lava, all that stuff.

Did a speed level where they had to cross a rising lava river with the stepping stones disappearing. I had a timer going off every two minutes. That was really good fun, they were fully panicking. At the other side they had to do a thing to get through the door. What thing? I didn't know. My trick is always that I do not know the solution. They just had to do something interesting.

The vertical level ended up a bit abstract. I had to lie it flat on the table, but it represented a vertical cliff, but the tokens stood up. I've just now realised we could have taken the tokens out of the stands and laid them flat. Whoops, never mind.

I cut out a bunch of stuff. There were tunnels between the petrified forest and the lava river we didn't have time for. The lava river had assassins originally but I just ran it as a race against the lava.

The pièce de résistance was a few weeks ago I gave the niblings a sealed note asking them to draw some dragons. They very seriously and secretly presented them to me the week before. I scanned them and printed them off as tokens. They were so stinking cute. My wife fully teared up.

Party Red Dragon A red dragon by the four-year-old.

All in all, a fun time.

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